The Twitterverse is buzzing after financial chief Anthony Noto made vague comments about the social network’s next steps.
It’s reported his comments imply Twitter will tweak its newsfeed with tweets generated by an algorithm, instead of by time. The Wall Street Journal has his comments while speaking in New York. See if you can guess what he means.
"'If you think about our search capabilities we have a great data set of topical information about topical tweets.' ... With that comes the need for 'an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people.'"
We'll spare you the angry tweets and backlash that came from Twitter users. That's granted. More surprising were the unsolicited labels attached to Thursday's headlines.
Many alleged the new timeline would be "Facebook-style curation," "Facebook-like Algorithmic Feed" or a "Facebook-styled filtered feed."
Mashable notes CEO Dick Costolo called out that GigaOM writer — on Twitter, of course — for making assumptions.
Mashable, among others like Buzzfeed, were also quick to put out the “Facebook-style” fire in the media.
BuzzFeed called it a game of "Twitter telephone" in which one message was misconstrued to another user who repeated the process to another user, and so on.
The reason users and even writers were upset is because the news counters Twitter's policy to keep its timeline mostly consistent, which it has done for eight years. Twitter's timeline shows tweets in reverse chronological order and without giving greater importance to one tweet or another. Noto believes using an algorithm could help discern important tweets and better connect to a user's interests more often. (Video via Twitter)
One thing we can predict: change at Twitter will be slow. At the end of the article Noto tells the Journal,
"Individual users are not going to wake up one day and find their timeline completely ranked by an algorithm."
This video includes images from Getty Images.
